‘No. You can’t take dogs with you on work trips. He’s… he’s… Is he at the cottage?’ she asked uncertainly.
Imaginary husbands I could just about get on board with, but not imaginary dogs.
‘No, honey, he’s not there.’
Amelia’s face crumpled like a child’s. ‘Then where is he? Did he die? Did Barney die?’
I had no idea how to answer that one and hoped my helpless shrug would suffice.
‘Why can’t I remember it? I should be able to remember. But my head feels like it’s full of holes and all the important things keep disappearing down them every time I try to grab hold of them. Why is this happening to me?’
She was crying now, and it wasn’t until I tasted the saltiness on my lips that I realised I was too. I gathered her into my arms and rocked her gently.
‘I don’t know, hon, but we’ll get to the bottom of this.’ I reached out my hand and grasped Mum’s, which was extended towards us, completing the family circle. ‘We’ll work it all out, I promise.’
*
‘I’m sure heisbusy,’ I told the ward assistant at the nurse’s station. ‘But my mother and I really need to speak to Dr Vaughan. Right now. Today.’
‘That’s not how it works—’ the young woman began, before being shut down by a hand placed firmly on her shoulder. I’d been trying to keep my voice down, but clearly the senior charge nurse had heard me even through the thickness of her closed door.
‘Let me see if he’s still in the hospital and can spare you a moment,’ she said with a kind smile at Mum – whohadn’tbeen raising her voice – and a nod of acknowledgement at me, who had.
Amelia was visibly exhausted and had made no protest when I told her I was going to take Mum down for something sweet and sticky from the Costa in the hospital foyer. I’d had to almost tug Mum from the room. ‘I don’t really want any cake, Lexi,’ she said when I’d eventually managed to persuade her into the corridor.
‘Nor do I. But I do want answers. So, let’s see if we can get some.’
*
Dr Vaughan’s consulting rooms were two floors below Amelia’s ward.
‘Come in, come in,’ came a voice that sounded much younger than I was expecting, in response to our knock.
It wasn’t just Dr Vaughan’s voice that was youthful, the rest of him was too. I’d been hoping for a doctor who could hand on heart declare that they’dbeen there, done that, got the T-shirt. I wanted a physician who’d seen it all and knew all the answers. But I was already afraid from the look in his eyes as he shook our hands that the reality might be somewhat different.
‘Please, sit down, both of you,’ he invited, gesturing towards two chairs on one side of the desk. He waited politely until we were seated before dropping down on to his own chair.
There were piles of patient folders on his desk, which surprised me in this age of computerisation. From one tower, which looked dangerously close to overbalancing, he plucked the topmost file. Even upside down, I could read my sister’s name.
He flipped the folder open and then spent several moments flicking through the paperwork within it. His forehead creased a couple of times at whatever he was reading, and his lips pursed and twisted, as though dispatching a persistent toffee, as he ran a finger down a chart that even if ithadbeen the right way up, I couldn’t have deciphered. Finally, he sighed, leant back in his chair and folded his arms across his abdomen. I deemed him at least a decade too young to pull off that manoeuvre successfully, but I imagined he thought it gave him gravitas.
Somewhere in his room there was a clock with an annoyingly loud tick, and if the doctor hadn’t broken the silence himself right then, I would have had to do so myself, just to shut out the noise.
‘Amelia is a very, very lucky young woman.’ It was a good sentence to lead with. ‘In fact, I’d go so far as to say she is quite remarkable.’ He’d certainly get no argument from the two women on the other side of his desk about that.
He unclenched his hands and leant closer towards us, resting his elbows on the desk as he turned to Mum. ‘You have obviously been told about your daughter’s condition when she was found on the beach and then brought in by ambulance?’
‘She had hypothermia,’ Mum replied hesitantly, as though answering a particularly tricky question onUniversity Challenge.
‘Indeed. Indeed,’ said Dr Vaughan, nodding like a professor in a lecture hall. ‘What’s important to understand is that inthiscountry we see very few cases of accidental hypothermia.’
I was familiar with the term from my Google searches, and it always struck me as slightly ridiculous, as though there might be a companion condition called ‘intentional hypothermia’ where you did it on purpose.
‘What is even more rare – at least in the UK – is for hypothermia to drop the body’s core temperature so low that it results in hypothermic cardiac arrest.’
‘When the heart stops beating altogether,’ I said for Mum’s benefit, in case she hadn’t been googling the same searches as me. But she was already reaching in her handbag for a tissue, so I guess she had.
‘Exactly,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘But even rarer still is when after an indeterminate period, when the patient is technically not breathing, they are then successfully resuscitated.’
